Written for SCHIRN magazine, on the occasion of the installation ‘Framework‘ by Bettina Pousttchi at Frankfurt Schirn.

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What does it mean? What does it mean to mean? What does it mean to express? What does it meant to impress? What does it mean to regress? What does it mean? What does it mean to matter? What does it mean to manipulate matter? What does it mean to manipulate the means with which matter matters? What does it mean to matter less? Matter more? Does it matter? Does it mean? What does it mean to copy? What does it mean to paste? What does it mean to open a new window? What does it mean to adjust levels? What does it mean to lose all your files? What does it mean to fail again, fail better, and then just fail? What does it mean to win? What does it mean to blow-up? What did it mean to Antonioni, his paranoid, forensic lens, the dead body at the centre of life? What does it mean to zoom-in? What does it mean to zoom-out, the way Michael Snow did in Wavelength? What does it mean to prefer the middle-ground? What does it mean turn foreground into background? What does it mean to you, to him, to her? What does it mean to a society, if such a thing still can exist, to find solace in the symbols of the past? What does it mean to say that you have hypochondria of the heart? What does it mean to people holding passports like yours? What does it mean to people holding passports like yours but not skin like yours? What does it mean to be your skin? What does it mean to turn attention to skin? What does it mean to a building when it is skin deep? What does it mean to obsess about the soul, the soul of a country, of a people, of a time, of an era, of a history of the now that is defined by who cannot share that same history? What does it mean? Who do you mean? What does it mean to care? What does it mean to care anymore about impossible things? Were things ever possible? When was that? Do you have the time? Whose time? Yours? What does it mean to tell the time? To whom? My time? What does it mean to claim that the world is flat, then not flat, then smooth, then striated? What does it mean to stock exchanges, derivatives, fluctuations and finely tuned financial instruments? What does it mean to you? What do you mean to them? Is this what you think when you think about your place in time and space, in space and time, when you stand in front of black and white lines arranged in repetitive rows according to an interpretation of geometries from faraway lands, mystic aesthetics, image prohibitions, Mohammadean anti-idolatory? What does miscegenation mean to you, to him, to her? What happens when images miscegenate? What happens when miscegenation miscegenates? What does it mean, mother? Father? Brother? Enemy? What does it mean to stand and stare and stop to think and not shy from the consequences of that thought? What does it mean to listen, not the way drones listen, but the way flowers listen? What does it mean to speak? To say? What does it mean to mean all these things, at once, like a meteor shower in the blackest of skies with someone you love? What does it mean to encounter? What will it mean? I meant every word I said.